Standing Up to Life

Chapter 8:

"BRANDON, WHAT DO you want to do when we get back to the condo?" Amy asked.

"I don't know, what is there to do?" I asked

"Well, we could play another board game – though that's a long time for games. We could go swimming in the pool there... We could play with my toys... Or we could just sit there and look bored?"

Part of me wished so much to play with her toys (Barbie's!), but my better judgment said there would be other opportunities for that if I went over to her house more. We had actually talked about me starting to come after school to hang out after school, this week. So... out of the other options I decided on swimming. I loved swimming.

"How about swimming?" I suggested.

"That sounds good, did you bring your swimming suit?"

Man how I wanted to say no to see what would happen... would it be like my dream at my aunt's house? But the scared and intimidated me said the real answer, "Yeah, I did."

"Okay then, let's go swimming when we get done with shopping!" She was fairly excited, I was glad to see that. I fed off of her excitement and we both talked rapidly for the next twenty minutes or so when we realized that we needed to go meet her parents.

We grabbed our skis and walked down to the parking lot. Amy thought about putting our skis on the rack but we couldn't reach that high. Her parents showed up a few minutes later though and her mom reached into the car for a camera.

"I want to get a picture of everyone together before we put the stuff up for the season." She had Mr. Hancock prop the skis up in the snow behind the car (there was a pile where the plows had pushed it up), and had us stand in front of them. As she was getting ready to take the picture she saw a resort worker and asked him to take the picture.

I had a feeling it would end up looking more like a family picture than a friend with a friend's family. I stood in front of Mr. Hancock, Amy in front of Mrs. Hancock. We took like ten or fifteen pictures like that with their nice camera, and then Mrs. Hancock got several with just Amy and me.

After we got done taking them I suddenly remembered I still hadn't taken the scrunchie out... Oh well. I didn't think you could probably see the scrunchie, you'd just see the hair pulled back. I decided not to worry about it. From there we got everything loaded back up.

Mrs. Hancock then said, "Okay, let's go look at the shops!"

We followed her lead to the various stores and looked around. She stopped in at one store that offered merchandise with the resorts name on it. "Amy, you need a new t-shirt right?"

"Umm... Yeah, the other one is fading really bad." She replied.

"Pick out a new one then," she said pointing at the t-shirts. Amy looked around and picked out a black shirt that had the resort logo in bright blue.

She then looked at me and asked, "which one do you want Brandon?" I was flabbergasted, after all they had done for me they were going to buy me a shirt too?

I must have looked confused though because Amy said, "Brandon, get the same one as me, it's unisex, and it would be fine for a boy to wear it too!"

I didn't know what Amy had in mind but I went along with it. I also discovered, much to my surprise, that Amy and I were the same size. That was strange, everyone at school except Nikki was taller than me but I actually thought I would be a little bigger than her. We got the shirts and finished up the shopping. From there we headed back to their condo.

"What do you two want to do when we get there?" Her mom asked.

"Brandon and I were talking about going swimming. Is that okay with you guys?"